[cwkoss]

Quasi-ethical business idea:

Sell open source software 'ghostwriting' services

It makes an engineer look good to have solid commits to an open source project on their github profile. The people who actually make the bulk of these commits put in tons of (at times thankless) free labor.

Create a grey market for open source software contributors to sell their diffs (that they've already written and actually entail useful contributions to their project) to some rich lazy wannabe engineers to submit to the repo, and get credit for. Bulk discounts for corporations!

It would get OSS devs more money, which is good, but is lying which is bad.

[navaati]

I don't know about the rest of the world but in France you cannot sell (or give, or transfer in any way) attribution rights, only copyright.

[jlokier]

I thought this didn't apply to computer programs, but I looked it up and you're right... In France, authors' moral rights are quite strong.

In the UK, the moral right of attribution exist, but there's a specific exception for computer programs, so that programmers don't have a right to be identified as the author, or as far as I can tell any other moral rights.

[avip]

Welcome to fiverr.

[kurtisc]

A lot of the 'development' is discussion over emails, cue a copied-homework moment when the maintainer asks why you chose to do it this way.

[oever]

A slightly more ethical alternative is to add sponsor messages to your commits.

[klwilson]

You can already get credit in open source projects without doing anything. Be on the mailing lists, present at conferences, claim ideas that weren't yours, treat actual code as a "solved problem".

[ghaff]

You don't need to be a developer to meaningfully contribute to open source projects.